


The Blue In His Eyes

by 13letters



Series: The Seasons That Change; the Kisses Home In Your Hips [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up, Romance, Sexual Situations, The Joy When He Does, The Pain of Crushing on Someone That Won't Notice You
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 10:00:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4344152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13letters/pseuds/13letters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time she sees Gendry Waters, she's nine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blue In His Eyes

The first time she sees Gendry Waters, she's nine.

He's fourteen, and he's shirtless, and as far as she's concerned, he has no stupid right to be. When did Jon decide to replace her as his rugby partner anyway?

"You want ice cream, kid?" Because Robb babies her just a bit more than he pretends to, and Sansa's in the car with Dad and Bran complaining about the lack of lemon-flavored ice cream in the world.

"No," because _she_ has been sulking all day, and Jon comes over to ruffle her hair.

"Maybe tomorrow, Arya," he says, but he looks hopeful instead of apologetic, and she really couldn't begrudge her favorite brother anything.

Even if stupid Gendry with his stupid sweaty, muscled bare torso is replacing her. She scowls at him with all the ferocity her tiny frame and Stark grey eyes can muster, but he smiles when he catches her eye after Jon and Robb go inside to scavenge the freezer for pizza rolls. Something in her thinks his quick flash of white teeth makes him look all the better.

"You're Arya?" he asks, moving to extend his hand for the proper handshake he knows the proper (rich) folks like her family like. But it's sweaty, and he thinks better of it, roughing through his hair instead.

 _You're Gendry_ , she almost says, but the ball in the crook of his arm has her simmering again. "You stink," she tries to scoff, marching back inside in all her wounded pride and false bravado.

His laugh is loud and booming and cheery and almost familiar, she briefly thinks, but it wasn't that thought that stuck with her.

\- -- - -- -

She's twelve, and Gendry still has the bluest eyes she'd ever seen.

Like a.. stormy sea at storm or -- no, she isn't Buttercup, and he isn't Westley, but he's still in the front yard with Jon and Robb and Theon, shirts against skins though there's really too few of them for that and no one wants to see Theon almost in the nude unless you're Margaery (or Loras -- no one's judging) Tyrell.

Maybe like the sky.

Yes, blue like the sky, deep and smart-looking, but she knew the truth of it. She had been sitting at the spare table in the kitchen one day, frowning over her grammar book when he'd come inside in search of the cookies Mum had made and hollered at the boys to eat while they were fresh from the oven, with special care to make sure Gendry took some home.

Catelyn Stark was warming to the boy now that she'd talked to him. Now that they had something in common, really.

Arya didn't want to think about that, and she didn't want to think about the rules of correct comma usage, but if she couldn't pass the class, she didn't get the tickets to that totally rad concert she wanted to go to in the summer.

So. "Help," she demanded of Gendry when she noticed him (as if she hadn't the second  
he walked in) when he opened the fridge for milk.

"Homework?" He grimaced, but then he smiled, and she kicked out a chair for him to sit next to her. With a quick glance to the page, his frown returned with her groan, because this was hopeless.

"You can't help me?"

He took one look at her, whining tone and tank top and messy brown hair, and she -- she was Jon's sister. She hadn't sprouted up like a weed in the spring this year or anything, no, no, "Yes," he muttered sheepishly, scooting his chair closer to the table and reaching for her book, her other sheets of paper, the pencil she was chewing on. "I'm just better with science, not these words or letters or nothing. Dyslexia," he added in afterthought quietly, erasing half the marks she finished on her assignment.

And she understood at once, maybe why Gendry had been at the shared school library more often than not, why he was in the guidance office, too. Maybe his graduation next year was a problem with his passing credits.

"I can help you in maths," she tells him earnestly in a strange moment, thinking only of helping him, not the pride in accepting his help with nothing given back in return.

He's silent a beat, blue eyes staring at her, and they're not oceans or seas or skies. Just him. Gendry.

And her cheeks are growing hot, and she can't keep holding his gaze though her instincts tell her to not back down, and she mumbles her agreement to whatever he says she isn't hearing properly, later to find out she's his new math tutor. And that's sorta perfect.

She nicks the other half of his cookie when he's too busy explaining _"semi-colon etiquette"_ , the nerd, but then she's late for her dance lessons. Ballet. He doesn't laugh when she tells him, but he does laugh months later when she tells him she failed her class.

He failed his maths class, too, and she apologizes profusely until he smiles and calls her stupid for once. When her laughter silences to an uncharacteristic frown, though, she has no choice but to tell him about the concert she's missing because of it.

"Which band?"

But she bites her tongue, standing there in her black cargo pants and cut denim jacket, because let's be real, she's a girl. An almost teen girl. Who happens to love American pop music with country notes and the heart of teen romance.

"Taylor Swift," she admits, turning her head so she doesn't see the look of scorn he gets whenever they'd pass a group of the snotty mean girls in the hallway.

"Uh." It's all he says, leaning against the door of his faded blue, beat-up truck.

He looks so lost, that giggling, she can't breathe, sputtering another cackling laugh each time she sees his pained, thinking expression as he drives extra slow because her feet are on the dash and he's tried telling her to take them down.

Once, she did for just a just a minute, until _Fallen Angel_ by Poison came on his old CD and her knees were drums on the dash. "Your music's so old!" she had shouted over the radio, but he just laughed.

As much as he loved his old music, it surprised her that much more when she found two tickets to Taylor Swift's Fearless next tour-stop a big city or two away in the front cover of the maths guidebook she loaned him.

"You really wanted to go," he shrugs when she shoves the tickets in his face, but he'd seen her iPod's tracklists. Taylor Swift. More Taylor Swift. Guns'N'Roses. He blamed Robb.

"And you're..?" She couldn't say it outloud, didn't want to hold onto the hope if it wasn't there.

"Coming with you," he grinned, like it were obvious, and she released the breath she didn't know she was holding, and he thought Arya Stark would be a heartbreaker one day if she kept smiling like that.

\- -- - -- -

When he turns twenty-one, she's been sixteen for three months.

For three years, he'd long since been coming to the Stark household for Arya instead of Jon, and for four, he'd been her best friend.

She thinks she knows everything about him now. Now more than ever, because she's older, _wiser_ , she tells him, and he grins that lopsided grin of dimples and a crinkle to the corners of his eyes she loves.

And she loves everything about him, she thinks, from the faded Van Halen shirt he'd had since he was fourteen that looks like it won't survive another trip through the wash (it does, but she's seen him shirtless everytime she's closed her eyes since she was thirteen anyways, so she can't complain) to the knock-off grey converse and the slow, concise tilt of his head to the left before he says anything remotely important. From his opinion on American politics to why he doesn't like barbecue potato chips to why he has fourty-nine Taylor Swift songs on his iPod now.

It's mostly him that's teaching her to drive, him and Jon every weekend he comes back from Uni, but she likes it with Gendry best because it's Gendry and the worn leather of his truck seats smell like him and the cigarettes he sometimes lets her "steal" when he pretends to not notice. Like how he pretends to not notice when she nicks fries off his plates at the diners they go to in the sketch part of town he lives in that her parents wouldn't overly approve of.

But they like Gendry like they like Theon, and _no, Rick, our parents don't like Theon more than they love you._

Or do they?

Loras Tyrell does still, but that's besides the point since he's dating Renly Baratheon.

The one time Shireen told Arya that her boyfriend (Gendry wasn't her boyfriend, but she didn't want to correct her when she could pretend he was for just this conversation or the next three weeks) looked like her uncle Renly, she was ecstatic.

Because boyfriend.

She wished.

She knows Gendry's only taking a few classes every semester, though, and she knows he's been illegally working at some dive bar where the floor sticks to his shoes and people scream at the televisions, and it's bloody fantastic because after much of her begging since she knows he can't refuse her, he smuggles her in.

Smuggling is an exaggeration, granted, he just walks in with his arm around her while her head is perhaps just a bit too consciously close to his sternum because he's close, and they've never been _this_ close, and no one bats an eye.

He tells her from the other side of the counter that everything he is working at this bar is everything he's not, and "Why?" she asks him finally, because she never really had before. "Why are you still here?"

He knew she and her family had moved down here from someplace North for her father's business with the Baratheons and their company when she was nine, and while she knows his favorite color and his favorite song and the meaning behind the tattoo on his shoulder and how beautiful his mum was before she passed, how she passed on her love of oldies to him, she doesn't know much else about him.

That's a lie. She's had him memorized since she was fourteen.

He worked at a mechanic shop during school, she learned. He spent his two week pay on those Taylor Swift concert tickets that were still the best night of her life.

"I don't have an answer for you," but she thinks he's lying, but his eyes are warm, and he lets her have a sip of his cheap beer before he mixes some soda and some raspberry flavor thing (non-alchoholic) for her.

Foam's stuck to her lip, he points out, and oh, she thinks dumbly, shrugging off the disappointment with a set of her chin in all the nonchalance she can muster to hide the fraility of her ego, that's why he was staring.

\- -- - -- -

The next time she sees him, Sansa's like an Ice Queen dressed for her senior prom. Floor-length, sleek, mermaid-esque gown with sheer sparkley things all lavish white. She's beautiful. Radiant.

Mum looks like she'll cry while Dad mutters something about her needing a shawl, and Robb's jesting about how big of a sod Joffrey is and how he doesn't deserve Sansa, but Arya thinks he's right.

When the doorbell rings, everything stops in the Stark living room, because "He's not supposed to be here early!" Sansa's shrieking, rushing back upstairs because she's changed her mind on the lipstick she's wearing and needs to properly make her debut down the grandiose stairs for Joff.

Jon's waiting ready with a camera, grinning at Rickon while the youngest boy says something about girls being stupid, but he knows, really knows, Shireen Baratheon is the smartest girl he knows. Who he'd been texting for the previous three hours.

Mmhmmm.

"It's just Gendry!" Arya shouts while everyone still bustles about for places, places, take a breath, action! Because this family is too dramatic and dysfunctional, but she loves them, opening the door for Gendry because you bet he was waiting up all night with Jon and Robb to make sure Sansa came home at a respectable time. They're playing video games, the mature lot.

"Did I miss it?" he asks, in part teasing, in part wary, 'cause next year it'd be Arya, wouldn't it?

"God, no," she huffs, "we're still waiting."

They cross the hall to the den where he sits on the couch next to her and steals her pillow, the bastard, but all malice is forgotten when Bran engages him in a debate on whether the X-Men could beat the Avengers, and it's like WWIII in the living room.

It's the X-Men, Bran declares with quite the factual argument, and how was her baby brother a comic geek part-time to the wise advice he gave her? Christ.

But when Gendry gives him the purple plush pillow he stole, she can't hide her smile.

\-- Until the door knocks again, Joffrey, and Sansa's emerging down the stairs like a goddess, even more beautiful and radiant with her silver heels tapping softly against the steps to match her jewelery, and she doesn't want to look at Gendry's face. She doesn't want to see him look at Sansa like she's the most beautiful creature he'd ever beheld, so she stares at the TV, sees the glare from the flashes of the camera as Jon freezes her sister and her lame boyfriend in time forever, reminds herself that it's her he comes to see and not her sister.

It's over before she realizes with Mum reminiscing about when it was Robb in his tux with a fucking Frey girl on his arm, and Gendry snorts, asks Arya if she's playing the old Resident Evil game with them.

"Nah," she says, and Bran's wise eyes are stoic beneath his arched brows. They'd talked about her crush on Gendry. "I don't feel up to it," she lies before retreating to her room.

Later, seconds after he knocks on her bedroom door where she wasn't just examining herself in front of a full-length mirror for any imperfections that separate her from Sansa, there's a crash, and the family's back at the hospital with McDonald's in the waiting room because that's their life.

Sansa's there with them, still a goddess on the blue uncomfortable seat, but this is routine, and she curls her fingers through Arya's chestnut brown hair when she rests her head in her lap, and dances are stupid, anyways.

\- -- - -- -

"You don't talk about it," she says one day, laying on the hood of his truck with him beside her.

"What don't I?" he asks her, all irrelevant, prolonged questions to the blue sky going aimlessly on before them.

She's seventeen now, has been for twenty-seven days, and what he never talks about has been on her mind since precisely then.

"That night," she mumbles elusively, coyly if she was pretentious enough. Her sneakers were growing hot on the heated metal, and she shifted, her arms starting to stick with sweat to the top, too.

He knew which night -- she felt the tension in the atmosphere with the tense of his arms beneath his head and the sharp intake of his breath, all muggy and warm. He smelled like sun screen and cigarettes and _Gendry_ , and she loved it.

And she's seeing that night all over again.

It's her birthday; the gifts had been pretty bombin' this year: headphones with the best sound anyone could ask for from Robb, a copy of the childhood book Mum would read to her and Bran -- from Bran. Sansa bought her some earrings she couldn't deny were lovely, Jon got her an actual swiss army knife, the parents had gotten her a gift she hadn't gotten yet, but it'd be big.

Rickon's gift was his keeping the secret of how Arya used her bedroom window more than the front door. Her birthday gifts to him were the same, though, they'd worked it all out.

But Gendry hadn't shown up.

It wasn't like her family were really the partying type, especially now with some nurse/health person living with them, but he hadn't come over. Or even called. And that hurt more than she liked to admit, but as soon as the lights were out at Stark Manor, she was out the window and in Robb's car (it drove faster).

Maybe he just forgot.

Maybe he was secretly a ninja and was off on some super secret mission.

Maybe he was.. working for the Baratheons, their half-son twice removed from the family name, hah.

She'd only been in his place twice before, once in the kitchen, once in the bathroom because that was a long, embarrassing story of mud and a ballet tutu and the song _Beat It_ and a hill that really had never been there before, nope. But the point -- she knew there was a key under the mat, and any reserves about knocking didn't come to mind when the metal slotted in the lock and the door opened and --

A woman with black curly hair sitting at his dining table with spaghetti between them and his shitty old music playing (nevermind that she loved it) and it looked like a date and he was laughing at something the bombshell of a woman must have said even as his eyes locked with Arya's, and no, no, not today, not on her birthday, _no_.

"Sorry," she stammers because they're both staring now, and she can hear moths outside the open door flickering to the porch light. "I'll just -- " She doesn't finish her thought. She's out the door, closing it behind her, taking care to not slam the screen though she suspected a good loud jarring noise could have woken her up from this nightmare, because it's her birthday.

Her _fucking_  birthday.

And he's on a date with someone else.

And she doesn't care; she hates Gendry Waters and his fucking guts and could care less about him when the screen slams from behind her.

"No," she says too loudly, because he'll try to stop her, and she needs to get back to the car. Back to the car where she can properly feel stupid and childish and pathetic for ever thinking the world in his blue eyes and the home she felt whenever he was in a three foot radius, and _no_.

"Arya," he calls after her, his louder footfalls making her walk faster. But he catches her arm with a tug, the force of his strength and the speed she was walking at sending her jerking against him, and she flinches back like he was fire.

"It doesn't matter," she tells him, scrambling on her feet, both her arms crossing over her chest as she stood up straighter to make herself seem taller. More.. grown. Womanly. Not stupid and childish and pathetic for thinking he was clueless all these years when his smirk now told her he wasn't.

"Her name's Bella," but why would she want to know? She can't even look at him, the moon light glinting the dark of his eyes. "She stopped by for dinner," he says next, and she leans back, guaging how fast she could run to the car before he'd stop her again. The chances were slim. "She's my sister."

And the world stopped, but not because she was breathing again since that woman wasn't his date, but because his lips were featherlight and soft against hers, pressing and warm and a breath of something she wanted forever with his rough fingers tenderly cupping her cheeks as he tilted his head as he kissed her, and he kissed her.

Quickly, and then it was over, and he gently tugged her to the door of Robb's silver Volvo when she couldn't move on her own. "I'm sorry," he was saying, but she couldn't hear him really, because he had kissed her. "I'm sorry, I know I'm a shit person 'cause I missed it, but I have to talk to Bella about something, and I'll make it up to you and call you tomorrow, yeah?"

Yeah.

"We kissed," she said, back in her mind, back to where they both are on the hood of his truck with her cheeks growing warm at the memory.

He's quiet; he always is at pivotal moments, she realizes, and when she thinks he's moving to get back into his vehicle, he's moving his arm around her shoulders, holding her just a breath closer to him. "Barely a kiss," he teased. "There wasn't any tongue."

"Well," she huffed indignantly, feeling her cheeks redden all the brighter. She could feel his stubble against her forehead, his lips to her hair, his heart against her cheek, and oh, God. "Not like I'd know," she muttered, because she lost all her reserves when his arm slid between them with his hand tilting her chin up.

He kissed her again, but there wasn't anything soft and tender and chaste about it.

She couldn't breathe, but she didn't want to, her fingers threading through his thick hair as his tongue at her lower lip pressed her mouth open, his rough stubble gently chafing her chin. And then his tongue hot against her tongue, the roof of her mouth, his teeth at her lips with a bite to bite back his groan, and oh, she could feel everything, _oh_ , his fingers skimming beneath the ridden up back of her shirt.

\- -- - -- -

When she's eighteen, he doesn't take her to prom.

He takes her to another Taylor Swift concert, or at least -- that's what he intended.

They don't move past his driveway, she went from her passenger seat to his lap to kiss him for the first time in ever, because as noble as he is, he hadn't wanted to do too much of anything 'till she was legally legal, so they could at least tell her family they waited until she was before anything happened, though he'd likely loved her about two years consciously, he thinks, subconsciously since he met her.

She's kissing the spot on his neck she found two weeks ago, the spot on the left side of his pulse that makes him moan, and he does, and his hands are squeezing her arse until she gasps, pushes back against the steering wheel so his hands are trapped, so the horn's blaring.

But she's laughing the bright, happy way she laughs like she does in the middle of every serious scene in any movie they'd ever seen in the past seven years, and she's back against him, over him _there_ , and he's seeing white for a moment.

"Do you want to?" she asks him, breathless and hot and teasing against his ear before she bites at it gently, and where did she learn to do that?

"Want to what?" Her chest is pushing against his, and while she's not as careful as she might be with her knees, he can't complain when his tongue is just over her collarbones, tasting the scent of her skin and feeling all of her sound in her moan.

"Go to the concert, stupid," but it sounds like the last thing on her mind is music, and he wrenches a hand free to open his car door.

With no small amount of precision and a shift of her hips against his that isn't entirely innocent in the way it has his mouth dry, she's out, and he follows her, and "Oh," she says like she tends to when they kiss, " _oh_."

He's pressed her up against the door, his tongue at once fighting the war of hot wetness that has him submitting to her each time their lips meet. "Bed," he gruffs out against her mouth, gasping, and he knows he won't take it all the way tonight, that it's something she might only want in the heat of the moment, but kisses are barely kisses if there isn't any tongue.

She's on the blue comforter of his bed and tugging her shirt off from around her head as he's tugging off his, but where she's seen him before, he's never seen her, and the yellow lace lining the cups of her bra has his cheeks burning, and his dark blue gaze sides up to her grey to see her smirk. "C'mere."

And he does, and his callused fingers are soft to her skin as he warms his hands to her belly and feels her squirm beneath him. When his palms move up to her breasts, his thumbs softly stroking the softness of her pale skin where her perkiness starts to round and fill his hands perfectly, he feels her fingers start down his abdomen, brushing against the black hair fading to his jeans' belt.

"Arya," he says, ragged because she was kissing him again with all the heat of them starting from the perfect way their lips moved together. His right hand comes to still hers, and taking care to not force his weight on her, he sides them up to rest over his heart. "There isn't a rush."

"Don't you want to?" And it's not relief in her eyes, but it's not disappointment either, and he laughs when he kisses her again, a soft peck to her lips.

"I do," he says, ignoring the flush of her cheeks spread to the tops of her tits, the hitch in her breath when the part of him her hips push against rubs against her. "But there isn't a rush," he repeats, giving her one last peck before he pulls himself up, slides his hand down her narrow, strong stomach to the waist of her trousers. "We stop when you say," he promises, his tone gentler and soft and serious.

She rolls her eyes at him, but he doesn't miss the relaxing of her hips beneath his hands, the sigh that escapes her when he gently tugs her jeans from her legs. "What are you doing?" She's perched herself up on her elbows to watch him, nodding once to his questioning look when his fingers hitch in the sides of her panties, and she can't breathe when he bares her to him. "What are you doing?" She repeats, more weakly, more needy, because she can feel his stubble prickling the insides of her thighs, feels his lips ghosting soft kisses against her legs.

"Before I do anything," he says, gruff and low and sweeping his tongue along the crease of her thigh and her.. her, _oh, God_ , she's nearly whining, her nails tight at his scalp. "I don't know what I'm doing."

Her eyes are closed when he looks up with his lopsided grin, and she arched off the bed with a scream when his tongue slipped against her where she was warmest and wettest.

\- -- - -- -

She's nineteen, and he's twenty-four, and he asked her to move in with him as casually as she asked him to get simple, matching, classy tattoos on the arse.

He shot that idea down as soon as she'd spoken it, and she laughed the entire way across the snobby part of town to get to that tiny Mexican eat-in with the best burritos anyone could ever find anywhere.

"Like, live together?" she questions, because she'd never thought about it before.

That's a lie.

She thought about what it'd be like to live with her older, attractive crush for a long time, but now they they went out most nights, were together all of them, unofficially became officially boyfriend and girlfriend a year ago, it seemed to make sense.

It made more sense than Jon punching Gendry when he told him he was in love with his sister.

"Sansa?" Jon asked at first, incredulous, because he was an idiot.

"If you want," Gendry said. "I mean, you have a toothbrush in my bathroom. Tampons in my bathroom. You have four of the five drawers in my dresser already stuffed with your clothes, but I only ever see you wearing my shirts." He shrugs, and the dimples she loves are brightening his grin as he inhales monstrous bites of his steak burrito.

It's heaven.

It's rapturous.

She might start moaning.

It's moments before she speaks again, really thinking about it and waking up next to him every morning. Sharing meals they'd take turns cooking, arguing over movie choices, doing other domestic things that sound so.. lovely. Dancing in the kitchen, falling asleep on the couch, helping him tie ties to the fancy parties her family still hosts.

"I want to," she tells him earnestly, and work schedules, her dance school schedules, everything else, they could figure it out. They would. "God, yes," and she's grinning like the Cheshire, shoveling more crisps into her mouth, seeing the next seventy-two years of their life together play before her.

His mouth's full of burrito so he can't talk, but she can see the shift in his eyes, the lighter blue, and they're both so happy. They'll share their good news tonight, they decide, at the Starks' party, and while he's preparing himself for the umpteenth interrogation he'll no doubt get from her dad, she gets a phone call.

They're back at the hospital.

The prognosis doesn't look good; it hasn't for months.

There was a treatment that helped years ago, Arya told him now since she never really had the strength to before, but now it isn't looking good.

But he knows. Leukemia. Bran's been in that damned chair forever, and when Gendry was seventeen, when he walked in on Mrs. Stark crying, she knew, too. He told her of his mum, how cancer claimed her life, and that was when she stopped frowning when he'd come over.

She was crying again now, and Sansa's hands were shaking too much to comfortingly soothe through Arya's hair like she always used to.

But Willas Tyrell was with her. He was already dressed for the gala that wasn't happening.

Nothing was happening right, and sobbing outside the hospital doors, she cried that into Gendry's chest.

"It's alright," he whispered, squeezing his arms around her, kissing her cheeks, the crown of his head. "Breathe, sweetheart. It's going to be alright."

Fists tight in the collar of his jacket, she forced herself to take a deep breath. "You're a shit liar."

And hysterically, they both fell to laughter.

\- -- - -- -

The next day, they're all told Bran has to stay in the hospital for a few (a lot of) days.

She just wants to go home, their home, so he takes her and the few boxes she packed. He turns the portable stereo to his Taylor Swift collection, and after she mutes it, she climbs into his lap to straddle him on the kitchen chair.

"I'm scared," she says in something small and uncharacteristic, pressing her lips to his temple.

"It's okay to be," he answers, and when her hands start to lift the hem of her (his) t-shirt over her head, he helps her.

"Lots of people leave," she mumbles, raking her nails against his back. Lots of people die.

"Not all of them." He inhales deeply when she does, tilts his head back when she lowers hers to his neck. It's just her words against his skin, though.

"You can't leave me." It's a whisper, quiet, soft, her mouth ghosting her warm breath against his neck, and she looks up to the blue in his eyes to have every raw emotion resting there.

"I won't," he swears, and she has to believe him.

"Okay," she whispers, her lips hot against his.

"Okay," he breathes back, before covering the tops of her thighs with his hands.

There's a zip, the rustle of her dress lifting, and _oh_.

\- -- - -- -

The next time she sees him in a tie, everything's dark.

Robert Baratheon is dead.

His father.

He'd known for about three years.

And she sat with him when he sat in stoic silence, all dressed for a funeral he didn't want to be at, and she didn't know what to say to him. What to do for him, but before she could do anything, he was out of his chair, pacing back and forth angrily.

It was the first time she'd ever seen him really mad, and it scares her before she remembers there's nothing he can do to hurt her ever, the git.

But he's shouting, and he curses the man yet to be six feet below the ground for abandoning his mum, for abandoning him, for doing nothing while she died but drink and whore around. For not even being here.

He doesn't speak at the funeral, but sins of the fathers, crimes of the son, his shoulders start to shake where he sits in the last pew in the church with her, cast in the shadows looming over him.

Cersei Baratheon makes her exit with the rest of her procession, and the look she gives him is so hateful and cruel, his teeth are gritting, his fists clenching.

"Lots of people leave," he tells Arya later, sitting on the couch in his wrinkled suit jacket with her curled up to him.

"Not all of them," because they've been here before, and he almost smiles.

"You can't ever leave me, Arya." He looks to her, red-rimmed blue eyes, and where he was angry, he's desperate and fearful and pleading.

"I won't," she promises like he did, shifting in his arms so they were heart to heart. Hers is cracking just a little, so she wraps her arms around him and lets him nuzzle his cheek against her boobs. "I won't, Gendry," she soothes, kissing the top of his head before ruffling through his hair. "I love you, yeah? I'm not going anywhere."

Soon, he's snoring into her hair, and she watches sleep flutter behind his eyelids.

\- -- - -- -

She's twenty-two. He's still twenty-six, and his blue eyes are confused as he looks over the different sinks in the shop selection.

"How do we pick one?" he asks, like she'd really have an answer.

"Find a pretty one?"

"It's a sink, not curtains." He's frustrated and scowling, and she giggles, curling her fingers through his. He only huffs in aggravation, slumping heavily against her smaller frame.

"Ah!" she shrieked dramatically, and the couple down the aisle turned to stare. "You're too big, get off!"

To her surprise (and relief) he laughed, wrapping his arm around her waist. "If I had a penny for every girl that's said that to me," he snorted, before scowling again at the sinks before them.

"You'd have one penny," she threw back with a smirk, and oh.

When she was nineteen.

His mouth on her mouth, his skin on her skin, the curl of his fingers inside her, stretching her, filling her with the need and the pleasure that swirled deep within her. Her hands on him, her teeth to his neck, the messy, unpracticed way they undressed each other.

He couldn't unfasten the clasp of her bra; she didn't know how to move her hands the way he liked on his cock, but heatedly, they figured it out, a push, a pull, their hips grinding together feverishly until they rid the rest of the layers between them.

And he was inside her, and she couldn't breathe, his thrusts pushing inside her with her trying to catch the rhythm of the electric way she fit, she fit, galaxies imploding or something, something.

Not really. It wasn't hot, it was awkward.

"Too tight," he grimaced, her grip on his shoulders, her legs around his waist. "If you don't, I can't -- "

Him hanging off the edge of the mattress, looking ridiculous while he reached for the condoms.

"What do I do with my hands?" she actually asked him when her fingers were around his --

His arm.

The hardware store. Right.

"But it's your penny," he grins, and oh, her heart seized.

"And yours," she whispers, pretending to know what she was reading about sinks.

"Arya?"

"Yeah, babe?"

"Arya."

She looks up to him staring at her, stealing her breath, blue eyes intense where her knees start to shake, and this is definitely a hardware store. "Gendry," she says, because what else could she say? She couldn't even think.

"I want to ask you to marry me, Arya," and he's biting his lip like he does sometimes when he's nervous, his eyes soft and hopeful and warm and -- smirking. "It's not like you'll say no," he laughs, turning her in his arms so she was against him.

"Oh, won't I?" All false bravado, all physical pain because she hadn't said she wanted to marry him, too. "You're arrogant."

"And stubborn." He licked his lower lip when he was a breath away from her, and she could melt if she were into that sort of thing.

Gods, she pounced, tightening her arms around his neck to pull herself up to his height, his mouth, with her legs hitched against his waist and locking at her ankles to keep her hoisted up. He slanted his mouth over hers to deepen the kiss, kissing her acceptance from her teeth, suckling the pinkness of her lower lip, stroking her tongue with his as they fell into each other and out of propriety.

"Yes," she gasped when he let her breathe, her cheeks flush and panting. "We'll tell my parents tonight at dinner, we're invited," but he wanted to get them home, wanted to get her clothes off.

"Can't we skip it tonight?" he called to her from the kitchen when they made it home, walking towards their room where she was already getting ready.

"Just come with me?" She glanced to him in the doorway, holding a simple cut black dress in front of her. "This? Or this?" A brighter blue dress, longer, laced sleeves.

He couldn't really tell; his eyes were drawn to the glimpse of black lacy lingerie he saw between dresses. "You can't wear that," he said at once, because she was going to be his wife, and if she wanted to be at her parents' dinner, then she needed to not.

"Why?"

Her tone was too innocent, too mischievous, and he felt himself get half-hard when she sauntered closer to him. "Arya," he warned, his neck going red as she stood in front of him.

"Come with me," she repeated, reaching her hand out to the front of his jeans.

"I will," he rasped, groaning as she squeezed. Nudging her backwards to their bed, he skid his hands up her thighs, wet the cloth of her bra with his tongue, lapped over the pert mound of her nipples.

"Come with me," she said again, pushing her hips against where she felt him neediest, where she'd die if he didn't touch.

"I already said I would," he mumbled into her skin, tugging her knickers down past her knees.

"No," and oh, oh. " _Cum_ with me," she drawled the new meaning, circling her hips up to him, moaning when he nipped at her ear.

And he did. And he looked into her eyes the entire time he was inside her, watched as the waves of her climax contorted her face slowly, beautifully.

When they finally make it the party, they're late, and everyone stares at them with shifting expressions.

"Happy I didn't take my mouth to you in the truck," she whispers, and his face is red when he shakes her father's hand.

"Still taking good care of my daughter?" Ned Stark asks, causing him to nearly choke before the man laughs. "She says you are."

Arya's been whisked away from him, he sees her beaming at him from across the room in the middle of a group of women he doesn't really know, and then -- Bran.

"I need your help with something," he tells him, and of course, he'd follow the young man anywhere.

Down a hall, beyond a room, through another hall, and Willas Tyrell is smoking a posh-looking cigar, nothing if not aristocratic. "We're hiding," he explains, shifting his ruined right leg on the couch.

He remembers the day of the car crash, yet another phone call to get to a hospital, Sansa weeping in the corridor, twisting her promise ring around and around on her finger, and the good news that while there would be permanent damage, Willas wouldn't be paralyzed.

"From?" Gendry stupidly asked, shrugging off his jacket and loosening his tie.

"You proposed to her, didn't you?" And he didn't know how Bran knew, but Bran knew everything.

"I did," he answers, feeling the smile start to grow on his face.

"My congratulations," from Willas, and then Rickon, stepping into the room all cut black jeans and an old rocker t-shirt that had been his before it'd been Arya's. She better be proud.

"I always knew you'd marry her," he said, pushing his hand through his unruly curls.

Bloody good.

\- -- - -- -

"You disappeared," she tells him the next morning, nearly forgetting how she ended up naked in bed for just a moment as she wiped the sleep from her eyes.

"I brought you breakfast, love," he says patiently, holding out a plate.

"No," but she sounds like she's moaning. Bacon. "At the dinner. You vanished."

"And you disappeared in a flock of women."

"I told Sansa, just so you know. No one else, because I hadn't seen Jon, and I wasn't going to tell Mum without you there to offer a strategic diversion." She's silent a beat, munching on a piece of bacon as he swallows his toast, and in seconds, he's choking on it.

"What?"

"I said I think Sansa's still a virgin."

"What?"

"And I think, uh. Rickon's dating your cousin?"

"Shireen?" The bookworm Shireen that was too good for anyone?

"Gendry?"

He catches her eye, passes her his coffee mug, because what else does his morning grouch want if not that?

"Gendry."

"Yeah?"

She's biting her lip, quiet another moment, and he has fourteen seconds to assume the worst. "We should let Rickon move in with us," she tells him, and oh, no one was dead, no one was wanted by the FBI, no one was suddenly becoming a vegetarian.

"Yeah?" he says again, frowning and ponderous and realizing she took his cup of coffee anyways without him noticing. "Do your parents think so, too?"

"Well, they don't know a lot about some things."

"Like where you were most of the year you were seventeen, right?"

She _pfft_ 's and slumps back against the pillows. "You were mostly in my room with me," she replies.

He blinks, because no, he definitely never jeopardized his life by spending the night in her bedroom. "I wasn't."

"Nope," she agrees, smirking up at him with the blanket covering her chest slipping just a bit lower. "But you could have been."

"And I could have been killed."

"Jon wouldn't kill you."

"Jon's dog could."

"We do have a spare room here, though."

"Rickon?"

She nods, "Mmhmmm. And then maybe eventually, we can get a bigger place."

"Suburban area? Picket fence?"

"Beach house, belltower?"

He chuckles loudly, and she remembers being thirteen and being told by Bran that Gendry only ever really smiles and laughs a lot when she's around. "Maybe a mansion, a hot tub?"

"Underground flat, drug busts every other night."

"Mmm. Right next to Theon's home, then."

This is easy, and this is nice, and she turns to face him when he flops down beside her, sighing happily as she curves her leg around both of his. "A bigger place, eventually?"

"Yes," he says slowly, because he knows he isn't as financially set as the Starks, but he doesn't want doubt in their bed with them. "With Rickon?"

"No, we'll kick him out in a year or two," she laughs, "but a spacious place could be nice."

"Lots of windows?"

"High ceilings."

She smiles as his eyes close and watches the plane of his lips form around the word. "Perfect."

"And a room for a baby." And his eyes are open at once, and he's looking caught between shock and panic and wonder and joy and _shit!_ "I'm not pregnant!" She shrieks, panicked and raising her hand to his face in case he started hyperventilating. Or choking. Or dying. "Just!" She's still shouting, and they're both sitting upright now. "In the future! Sometime! I had a pregnancy scare, okay!"

"What!" He's yelling, and she's yelling, and neither of them can move all twisted in the blankets.

"I know that you know about it!"

"When!"

But then she's lethally quiet, her grey eyes boring into his blue with a look he knows, and oh.

The night in the truck. _Oh_.

"We should keep condoms in the truck," he finally says, though she's been on the pill for years. And they could have been parents. "..You didn't tell me?"

"I didn't know," she tries to explain, as fierce as she usually does. But the facade's gone as quickly as it's come, and she leans forward, presses her nose to his shoulder. "I was scared. Until I wasn't anymore? When I took the test. I stopped being panicked, y'know? Thinking there could be a little person inside me. Our little person." He wants to understand, and he might, and that night in the truck was nearly a month ago. "I was going to tell you, but then I got distracted. And then I told you now."

It's a lame excuse, and it's totally his Arya, and he sighs, breathes in her hair. "Maybe you should stop taking the pill," he finally murmurs, his eyes closed to that heart attack, that split second joy, of all he could say now. "If you're thinking we --"

"Gendry," she whispers, puckering her lips so her kiss is set to his shoulder. "Why don't we get married now?"

\- -- - -- -

Two weeks later, she turns twenty-three, and he's still twenty-seven.

Rickon hasn't precisely moved in, per se, but there's a lumpy mattress in the spare room he claims a few days a week. It just gets hard sometimes, but then he'll be graduated, and he doesn't really blame his parents for being too preoccupied to not ignore him.

At least Gendry's talked him out of doing stupid shit for attention.

"You don't have to paint a water tower for Shireen," he explained like it were the simplest thing in the world. Obviously, Gendry was such a master of romance, so Rickon listened. "Just memorize _Hamlet_."

No.

But it's a week after her birthday when Gendry walks into the kitchen, distractingly scratching at his happy, _happy, dear God, look at him_ , happy trail, and with his usual sleepy grin of bright blue eyes when he catches her cooking breakfast and burning their breakfast, he pauses at the counter.

"Hey," he says, looking at the small package on the counter, arching his dark brows at Arya. He looks to the bin next and smiles when he sees her nod, going on to toss her birth control pills into the garbage before he comes behind her and wraps his arms snuggly around her waist. "I love you," he murmurs against her neck, and he remembers saying it to her for the first time.

On the phone. Like an idiot.

He grimaces, but she's still all smiles, and of course, the pancakes she's cooking are for Rick.

"What's going on today?" he calls from the front door, following his nose to the food waiting for him.

"We're getting married today," she tells him like she's asking him to empty the bin, and Rick snorts, shakes his head of auburn hair like he doesn't believe her but slaps Gendry on the shoulder anyways.

"Honeymoon somewhere great," he says, and Gendry laughs, pinches Arya's arse.

"We'll be here, kid." But maybe that'll keep him out of the house like it'll get him keeping their secret for them.

And sixty-two miles, three hours waiting in a long line later (playing Taylor Swift, naturally, both of them with a single earbud and her occasionally saying _this music is shit_   too often and too loudly with a gigglesnort), they're married.

They had the piece of paper to prove it, and she stares at it for twenty minutes on a bench outside the courthouse, reaching out swiftly to take hold of his hand. "I can't believe we're married," she whispers, and if she didn't sound so contented and dreamy, he might be worried she had second thoughts.

"I can," he grins, and she punches his shoulder.

"What do we do first as a married couple?" She leans against his side heavily (lightly), sighing when his arm finds its absent way to her waist. It's a long walk to their truck, but the sun's high above them, and why didn't they do this earlier?

"Those matching tattoos you wanted," he teases her, pinching her side playfully. "Skydiving? Blueberry waffles at Waffle House, hmmm." Before he can tell her consummation is the only answer, her phone rings, and it's sixty-five miles to the hospital, an hour and a half of traffic, her fingers locked tightly through his.

Rickon almost looks suspicious when they walk in, but when Arya nods, he smiles and whispers something to Shireen. She's wearing that old shirt Rickon stole from Arya stole from Gendry, but she looks happy.

And now that Arya's looking around and really seeing everyone, Sansa's hugging Mum instead of sitting worried in the chair-bench she always shares with her instead. And Mum's definitely crying, but those tears are happy ones, and Robb's kneeling on the floor with Dad, and they're praying, and they're smiling, and it's Jon who comes over to her, still dressed in his uniform, all of them looking happy. _Relieved_.

"You've got dirt on your face," he tells Gendry, and he's grinning though his eyes are red, and it's Arya's lipstick kiss on Gendry's cheek, but she's tugging at his arm, because she needs to hear him say it. "Bran's going to be alright," he says next, "he's okay."

And for now, that's okay, because six years ago the doctors said he wouldn't even live past twenty-one.

She goes to her Mum's arms, and they weep.

\- -- - -- -

She's twenty-three, and he's twenty-eight, and _damn_.

"Y'know you're hot, don't you?"

She's entitled to watching him run around shirtless in the front yard with Jon and Robb and Theon, because Jon's on leave from his stationed military base of imprisonment, Robb's just returned home after graduating from Oxford, and Theon --

"Are those steroids?" she whisper-shouted at Gendry, her eyes on Theon Greyjoy and the abdomen he never used to have. Or maybe he did have it? She was always watching Gendry.

Who was now standing in front of her fully, and damn his sweaty, muscled, perfectly sculpted pectorals at her eye-level. "Mine aren't," and she snorted at his suggestive wink.

"You are hot," she tells him, grinning as he engulfs her in his arms.

"You're not going to tell me that I stink?"

He sounds teasing, but her heart sinks to her chest just a little. "You remember that?" It wasn't one of her gloriously defining moments, and God, her nine year old self was so stupid.

"I do."

"That's excellent, practicing your vows before the ceremony!" Sansa shouts at them from her lawnchair, pregnant and lounging, and hah.

Rickon and Bran and Shireen are the only ones who know they eloped, but they like it that way, though Sansa and Mum are still planning their huge white wedding ceremony.

What they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

"I used to pretend you were my boyfriend," she tells him softly, urgently, and she can't say why.

But he laughs, and blue is so bright, and the glint to him is in part mischievous, teasing, heart-stopping. "Mrs. Waters," he chastises, just a whisper, and _oh_. "Your husband might be jealous."

And since her back is to the house, no one can see him palm her arse or flex his hips against her subtlely enough to not be missed, pressingly enough to send a flush down her neck, and she swats at him. He doesn't need to look at her like that, like she's the start of the universe or naked in his bed, and no, he's stupid and sweaty and muscled and Jon should be playing rugby with her instead.

"You stink," she scoffs at him, but his laugh is just as loud and warm as his eyes are before they close, before he kisses her and Jon shouts at them.


End file.
